
































































































































































Class 



1 C- 


Book._ . . 

Copyright ■ 


COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 






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CHILDREN of HOLLAND 



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V 
















To My Niece 

ENID EMOGENE KINER 



Big families are popular and the baby may have seven 
or eight brothers or sisters 















CHILDREN OF 
HOLLAND 


By 

GRACE KINER 

11 

Drawings by 

CHRISTINE L. CHISHOLM 

•JSEBHT 

v 

) 

* 

1 1 
> » > 


THOMAS S. ROCKWELL COMPANY 

CHICAGO 

1930 















PZtf 

Xs'h 

Ch. 


Copyright, 1930 by 

THOMAS S. ROCKWELL COMPANY 

CHICAGO 


Printed in United States of America 
by Wallace-Homestead 


©CIA 26725 

AUG - 


4 iS3() 




CONTENTS 

I A Dutch Childhood 9 

Babies — Tarts — Caps — Wooden Sh oes — 

Beaches — Spates — Schools—Geography 

II A Land Below The Sea 15 

The Low Land — Difoes — Dunes — Rocfo—The 
Bosch—The House in the Woods 

III A Brave Country 20 

The Boy King—The Milkmaid of Dort — Cut¬ 
ting the Dyfoes—Orange Sashes and Ties 

IV A Land of Flowers 27 

Polders — Tulips — Cabbages—Dining Rooms 
and Stables—Cupboard Beds—Dog Carts 

V Good Things to Eat 33 

Six Meals—Sweet Cafos — Hodge-Podge — 

Hopjes — Gingerbread — Suiters—C 00 foes 

VI Back to the City 37 

Carts and Canal Boats — Windmills—Islands 
— Diamonds — Orphans — Stoofjes—Doctors 

VII Holiday for Everybody 46 

Kermis—Saint Nicholas’ Day — Waffles — 

Por^ Barrel Children—Brofon Eggs 

VIII When Jan Goes Courting 57 

Courtship Fires—Cafo Invitations—Pictures 
— Museums—Soldier Portraits 














Chapter I 


A DUTCH CHILDHOOD 

W HEN a new little Dutchman is born in Hol¬ 
land everyone knows about it. If it is a boy 
a red silk ball is hung by the door; if it is a 
girl the ball is pink. In Haarlem, a city in central 
Holland, the family hangs a piece of lace at the door 
of the house where there is a tiny baby. This is a 
custom carried on since the time when the city had 
to surrender, after a terrible battle, to the Spaniards. 
The general who was in charge of the Spanish troops 
said that if a bit of lace was hung at the door of the 
house where there was a little baby his soldiers would 
not enter that house. 

Then the father and mother of little Jan, or Betje, 
or Wilhelmina, or Annetje, or Aartje, or Tryntje, or 
Pieter, send the aanspreker to the homes of their 
friends to tell the glad tidings. He is an announcer 
who goes about to tell the news of births and deaths. 

The friends of the baby’s mother come to see her 
as soon as they can, bringing a large tart, almost as 
big as a pie. These are laid out in the room. If she 
has a great many friends there are often as many as 
thirty tarts. They are not eaten, because they show 


9 


10 


CHILDREN OF HOLLAND 


how many friends the family has. When the guests 
have presented the tarts and admired the baby they 
are served with little cakes and a kind of wine, called 
“brandewyn,” which is handed around in a special 
silver or gold cup. 

In Friesland, one of the northern states of the 
Netherlands, the older girls go with the baby when 
he is taken to the church to be baptized. They take 
turns carrying him, which is supposed to bring them 
good fortune in later life. Every girl is proud to 
say when she is married, “I helped to carry Jan, 
and Aartje, and Juliana, to their christening.” 

The people of Holland like big families, so that 
the new baby may have seven or eight brothers or 
sisters. They are all well taken care of because 
nobody is very poor in Holland. Dutch babies have 
round fat faces, blue eyes, and yellow hair. They 
have lots of good milk and butter and eggs to eat 
and grow fast. They are seldom sick because no 
germ can live in the shining cleanliness of a Dutch 
home, where the women are always scrubbing. 

So little Juliana, who is named for the princess who 
will rule over the Netherlands some day, crawls over 
the clean white and blue tiles of the kitchen floor, 
and her big brothers and sisters see to it that she does 
not fall into the canal that runs near the house. As 
soon as she is able to walk she is dressed very much 
like her mother in several full skirts with an apron 






A DUTCH CHILDHOOD 


ii 


over them, a tight waist with a white collar, and a 
white cap. 

Every different part of Holland has a special kind 
of cap for the women to wear. Some of them are 
tight to the head with wide flaps over the ears; some 
are lace and worn over a close-fitting cap of gold 
coins; some are very large and stand out all around 
the head. Little girls start to wear caps as soon as 
they can walk. 

Juliana’s little brother wears a little black cap, a 
blue or black sweater, and full trousers held up by 
four big silver buttons that are his very own, and 
that are used on all of his trousers, even after he is 
a grown man. 

Everybody in Holland wears wooden shoes, carved 
out for them by the father of the house or by a shoe¬ 
maker. The land is often wet and the roads and 
streets are of rough cobblestones, and wooden shoes 
are a cheap protection against stones and dampness. 
When a group of children are going home from 
school they make a great clatter. The name for the 
shoes is klompen, a word that sounds just like the 
noise they make. Of course the shoes are taken off 
before anyone goes into the house and slippers are 
put on instead. When the family is at home a long 
row of shoes stands by the door. On Saturday the 
shoes are scrubbed with soap and water and set in 
the sun to dry. Sometimes they are given a coat of 




12 


CHILDREN OF HOLLAND 


whitewash to make them look even cleaner. Jan 
may have a pair of leather shoes to wear for Sunday; 
if he lives in town he probably does, but he wears 
his klompen for everyday. 

Besides being a way to keep feet dry and out of the 
mud, wooden shoes make the best of playthings. 
They can be used for boats to sail in the canal with 
a paper sail and a piece of string tied to the heel to 
pull them back. They make good cradles for little 
dolls, and they are set by the fire for St. Nicholas to 
fill with cakes and coins on Christmas Eve. Perhaps 
the reason why Dutch children never quarrel is that 
they might get badly hurt if someone started throw¬ 
ing wooden klompen. 

The sea is so close to every part of Holland that 
everyone can go there in the summer for swimming. 
The fine sandy beaches slope so gradually into the 
water that they are safe for even tiny children. The 
water in the canals stands still and in the summer 
smells very badly, but in the winter it freezes over 
and everyone, from little Jan, who can only just walk, 
to his grandmother, puts on long skates that curve 
up at the front, and goes like the wind. Ice boats 
with sails to catch the wind go faster than the fastest 
automobile. If Juliana is too little to skate her father 
pushes her in a chair on runners. Girls skate along 
with a yoke over their shoulders and a basket in each 
hand carrying butter and eggs and cheese to town. 



In the winter time everyone puts on long spates that 
curve up at the front and goes seating 


13 














A DUTCH CHILDHOOD 


*5 


Fat men sail along with their pipes in their mouths; 
nobody minds the cold and everyone has a good time. 

When Juliana and Jan are six years old they must 
go to school. The schools are much like those in 
America. They sit on benches and study reading, 
writing, arithmetic, grammar, history, and geog¬ 
raphy, and when they have learned enough they go 
on to a higher school. Then if they wish to study 
more they may go on to the University of Leyden 
or one of the four other great universities. 

They learn very nearly the same things that an 
American child does in all the subjects but history 
and geography. These are very different because 
Holland is a land that has been taken away from the 
sea and because the Dutch people had to fight for 
eighty years to get their freedom from Spain. 










Chapter II 


A LAND BELOW THE SEA 

W HEN a child of the Netherlands goes to 
school he learns a great deal of history, but 
very little geography. His country is so 
small that from one of the tall church towers in 
Utrecht, a city in the central part, he can see the whole 
of it. All together it is about one-third as large as 
the state of Illinois. 

In his geography lesson he learns that his little 
country is just across the water from England and is 
bounded on the north and west by the cold North 
Sea, on the east by Germany, and on the south by 
Belgium. The country of Belgium was once a part 
of the Netherlands. A sea eighty miles long and 
forty miles wide cuts into the northern part of the 
country. This is the famous Zuider Zee, or Southern 
Sea, so called because it is south of the North Sea. 

The first people of the country named it Neder¬ 
land, or Low Land. And it is low land. Much of 
it is twenty or thirty feet below the level of the ocean, 
so that people in ships can look down on the houses 
near the shore. Long ago the water came over the 
fields and left marshes and lakes everywhere, but the 


16 










A LAND BELOW THE SEA 


17 


sea itself helped the people to keep it out by throwing 
up high ridges of sand along the shore. These long 
hills are called dunes. 

When the Dutchmen saw that the sand dunes kept 
out the sea they tried making ridges of their own 
along the shore out of earth and rocks and logs. 
They called these man-made dunes dykes. Then they 
dug canals and ditches to carry off the extra water, 
put up great windmills to pump it out, and planted 
the land that had once been the bottom of the sea to 
grass or grain or flowers. Then they brought in the 
black and white cows to eat the grass and grain and 
give the large pails of milk to use in making cheese. 

There are not many fences in Holland, nor very 
many roads. The little ditches full of water act as a 
dividing line between one farm and another, and the 
canals and rivers are used as highways. Gaily painted 
orange and blue and green boats carry the farm crops 
to market. Three big rivers run through the coun¬ 
try, the Rhine, the Waal and the Lek. Four large 
canals and hundreds of small ones connect all parts 
of the land and give a way to the sea. 

It is an enormous job to make dykes that will keep 
out the roaring sea. They are great walls forty feet 
wide at the bottom and sloping up until they are 
thirty feet wide at the top. Roads often run along 
the top of the dykes and sometimes houses are built 
high above the town there. 





i8 


CHILDREN OF HOLLAND 


They are made of earth, packed close, of rocks 
brought from England, because there are no stones 
in Holland, and of mats made of willow branches 
which catch the sand washed up by the sea. Logs 
used to be used, but trees are scarce in the country 
now, so that the trees are carefully saved. There is 
almost no coal in the Netherlands, so that for a long 
time trees were cut down for fuel until they were 
almost gone. 

One forest is the pride of the people of The Hague, 
the city where the queen lives. They call it the 
Bosch, which means the Woods. It is made up of 
great oak trees, which are not clipped and trained, 
as are most of the trees in Holland, but allowed to 
grow as they please. One of the Counts of the prov¬ 
ince saved this forest so that he and his friends could 
go hunting for deer in it. A long time after he died 
the Princess Amalia, the widow of the Prince 
Frederic Henry, who was the youngest son of the 
first ruler of Holland, built a home for herself in one 
end of the Bosch. She called her house the Huis 
ten Bosch, or House in the Woods. 

The House in the Woods is very plain on the out¬ 
side, but inside it is furnished with gifts from the 
whole world and is fit for any king or queen. It is 
a famous little palace. In it princes have danced 
and then gone out to stir up revolutions and to meet 
their deaths. In it a great American scholar, the 








A LAND BELOW THE SEA 


*9 


friend of the Princess, lived while he wrote a famous 
history of Holland. He was John R. Motley and his 
history was The Rise of the Dutch Republic . A 
picture of him hangs on the wall of the palace along 
with dozens of the pictures that the lonely Princess 
had painted of her husband and of the battles he 
had fought and won. 

In the Orange room with its eight walls the first 
world peace conference was held in 1899. Here 
sometimes the queen of Holland and her family 
come to spend a few summer days. 

But it is not enough to build a dyke. It must be 
kept in repair all the time. Thousands of men work 
every day of the year on them. A kind of grass that 
makes matted roots is sown on them to hold the 
sand from blowing away. No child of Holland 
would think of pulling a single blade of that precious 
grass. The Dutch rabbits are not so patriotic, how¬ 
ever. They make burrows in the sand and eat the 
roots of the grass. The children hunt the rabbits, 
and when they catch them, the family has rabbit 
stew for supper. 

New dykes are being built all the time. Within 
the next forty years they plan to drain most of the 
Zuider Zee and get hundreds of square miles of farm 
land from the bottom. The war with the sea goes 
on every day. Sometimes the ocean wins and sweeps 
away whole islands and drowns the people of large 






20 


CHILDREN OF HOLLAND 


villages. In many places people keep a boat fastened 
to the house so that if the sea comes in over the street 
the family will have a way to escape. 

Every child is told the story of the little boy who 
kept his hand over the hole in the dyke all night 
until help came, although he nearly died of cold. 
The little province of Zeeland at the north has as its 
crest a lion rising out of the water, and its motto is, 
“I struggle, but I emerge.” Most of Holland has 
struggled, but emerged. 

It is cold in Holland most of the year, for chilly 
winds blow in from the North Sea. It rains a great 
deal and there are heavy fogs. The people raise 
and milk their great black and white cattle, make 
their cheese, grow crops of flowers and grain, manu¬ 
facture cloth and cut diamonds in the cities, and fish 
in the Zuider Zee and the North Sea. They have 
many large towns because they have for hundreds of 
years been a trading nation, building ships and carry¬ 
ing goods from one country to another. 





Chapter III 


A BRAVE COUNTRY 

I F JAN and Juliana do not have much geography 
to learn they make up for it when it comes time 
for history. No country in the world has had a 
more exciting past than has the little land of the 
Dutch. 

Long ago the Romans owned the Netherlands and 
Belgium, which they called the Low Countries. A 
great many people of Rome moved up to the lands 
near the North Sea and started the building of 
canals and dykes that has continued to this day. 
They made roads there, too, as the Roman soldiers 
did everywhere, because they must have a way for 
the army to get from one place to another. The 
Main Street of many a Dutch town is the old high¬ 
way of the Roman legions. When they plow their 
fields the farmers still find Roman coins, and little 
dolls that the Roman children played with, and 
jewelry that a Roman lady wore. 

Christian teachers came from England to Holland 
and taught the Dutch their faith. In 730 the first 
church was built in what is now the city of Utrecht. 
Then it was an old Roman ford across a river. 


21 


22 


CHILDREN OF HOLLAND 


Charlemagne, the great ruler of the French, lived in 
a palace he had built at Nymegen, along the Waal 
river, when he was not fighting. He and his descend¬ 
ants ruled in Holland for three hundred years. 

A great many famous men named William walk 
through the pages of Dutch history. The first one 
of that name was one of the Counts of Holland. He 
went on a crusade to free the Holy Land from the 
Turks, but he never got to Palestine. Instead, he 
became very famous for his help in the fighting in 
Egypt. 

After a long time of warfare and changes of rulers 
Holland came under the power of Charles the Fifth, 
who was emperor of most of Europe. In 1544 he 
made a little boy eleven years old, ruler of the Dutch. 
The boy’s name was William, too. Because he could 
keep still when he needed to they called him William 
the Silent. But his people, who loved him, called 
him Father William. 

William the Silent was a prince of the House of 
Orange, a family that has been a part of Dutch his¬ 
tory for four hundred years. The Princess Juliana 
of Holland today was named for the mother of this 
William. She and her mother, Queen Wilhelmina, 
belong to the House of Orange. 

When William the Silent was a grown man war 
broke out between Spain and Holland, a war that 
lasted eighty years. Spain claimed Holland as her 



A BRAVE COUNTRY 


2 3 


property because Charles the Fifth had given it to 
the king of Spain. The king of Spain, Philip the 
Second, was a Catholic, and many of the people of 
Holland were Protestants, that is, they did not belong 
to the Catholic church. Philip sent the terrible 
Duke of Alva and his son, Don Frederic, with a great 
army to put to death everyone who was not a 
Catholic in all of Holland. 

When the people of the Netherlands heard this 
they got together an army under Duke William and 
said that they would rather die in battle than submit 
to the rule of the cruel Spanish king. They fought 
for Dutch liberty just as the American army under 
George Washington fought for American liberty 
two hundred years later. 

The war started with the great seige of Haarlem, 
which lasted for months. Time after time the 
Spaniards stormed the walls, and time after time they 
were driven back by the brave citizens who threw 
down stones and boiling water and hoops of lire on 
their heads. The women fought side by side with 
the men. But their friends outside could not get 
food to them and the people of Haarlem had to 
surrender after many of them had starved to death. 
Then thousands of them were killed by the 
Spaniards, although the general had promised to let 
them go free if they gave up. 

There is a good story told about a milkmaid of 




24 


CHILDREN OF HOLLAND 


the town of Dort. One evening she went out to 
milk her master’s cows and saw Spanish soldiers 
hidden beneath the hedges. She kept on singing 
her song and did not show that she saw anyone. 
When the milking was done she went home and told 
her master. He went to the mayor of the city with 
the news and the mayor had the water turned in 
over the meadows and all the soldiers were drowned. 
The people of Dort were so grateful to the little milk¬ 
maid that they gave her a sum of money every year 
for the rest of her life, they put up a statue of her in 
a public place and put a picture of her with one of 
the cows on all their money, where it is to this day. 

Many times the people of Holland have made the 
sea that is their greatest enemy help them in war. 
The second great battle with the Spaniards was at 
Alkmaar. This town today is the greatest cheese 
market of all Holland. It was surrounded by so 
high and strong a wall that the Spaniards could not 
break through. They tried to starve the town out, 
as they had done at Haarlem, but the citizens of 
Alkmaar cut the dykes and let the sea in on the 
Spanish camp. 

The most famous siege of the war was that of the 
city of Leyden, a town south of Haarlem and Alk¬ 
maar. There the people held out for months when 
they were so starved that they ate the leaves of the 
trees and the grass in the parks. William, who was 



Milkmaids carry their pails of mil\ with a wooden 
yo\e across their shoulders 


25 

















































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A BRAVE COUNTRY 


27 


in the north of Holland, tried to send food to the 
Leydeners, only to have it fall into the hands of the 
enemy. The citizens went to the mayor and asked 
him to surrender, but he refused saying, “You may 
kill me and eat my flesh rather than surrender to the 
Spaniards.’’ 

Finally William cut the dykes and the waters 
poured over the Spanish camp and boats loaded with 
food sailed up to the gates of the city. Before they 
would eat they went to the church to give thanks. 
The seige had lasted more than five months and 
more than half of the people had died of disease 
and starvation. As a reward for their courage 
William promised to Leyden any gift that they might 
ask. They asked for a great school to be built there. 
This was done and today Leyden University is one 
of the finest in all Europe. 

William the Silent was killed when he was fifty- 
one years old by a man who had been hired to do it 
by the king of Spain. He is buried in the church at 
Delft, the city where he was killed. The great 
American writer, Motley, said of him: “As long as 
he lived, he was the guiding star of a whole brave 
nation, and when he died the little children cried in 
the streets.” 

After William’s death his son Maurice ruled for a 
long time. He was a wise and good ruler. He 
helped ship owners to start trade with India and 



28 


CHILDREN OF HOLLAND 


China. He sent Hendrick Hudson to explore in the 
new country that Columbus had discovered. After 
Hudson had found the great river that has his name 
Duke Maurice sent a colony of Dutchmen over to 
make a settlement along that river. They called 
this colony New Amsterdam. 

After the Dutch had helped to drive Napoleon out 
of Europe in 1815 another William of the House of 
Orange became king of Holland. He was the 
fourth ruler of that name, but he was the first one 
to be called king. The others had been called Prince 
or Stadtholder. Therefore, this William was called 
William the First. His son was William the Second, 
and his grandson was William the Third. Then came 
the present Queen Wilhelmina, who has ruled a long 
time and very well. She has a daughter, the Princess 
Juliana, who will be the next ruler of Holland. The 
people are very fond of their Princess and they cele¬ 
brate her birthday on April 30th, by the little girls 
wearing orange colored sashes and the boys wearing 
orange neckties and putting up orange streamers in 
the streets. 

They say in Holland: “Our Queen is good to us, 
but she should be, we are very good to her.” The 
flag of The Netherlands is three broad stripes of red, 
white, and blue. Their motto is the one used by 
the first great William, called The Silent: “I will 
maintain.” 





Chapter IV 


A LAND OF FLOWERS 

I F JAN and Juliana live in the city they will surely 
go out into the country in the spring. When it is 
tulip time in Holland it is the loveliest country 
in the world. And the best place to go would be 
Haarlem, the city of the dreadful seige. 

The great lake near the city has been drained. A 
place that has been drained is called a polder, and 
the Haarlem polder has a kind of sandy soil that is 
especially good for growing flowers. About the 
year 1300 the knights of Holland went on Crusades 
and brought back with them bulbs and seeds of the 
flowers that grew in Persia and Turkey. They found 
that the tulips grew better around Haarlem than 
anywhere else. Ever since the farmers in that part 
of the country have been growing tulips. 

There was a time four hundred years ago when 
the Hollanders became so excited about their tulips 
and the new kinds that they were raising that they 
gambled with tulip bulbs the way people today 
gamble with money. A single bulb often came to 
be worth thousands of dollars. Of course, the Hol- 


29 


3° 


CHILDREN OF HOLLAND 


landers got over this fever, but the growing of tulips 
has made them rich without gambling. 

In the spring the fields are gorgeous blankets of 
color. The beds are in straight rows of red, yellow, 
or purple tulips that reflect their bright colors in the 
black water of the canals. The boys and girls work 
in the fields with their fathers cutting the good 
blooms to pile in the canal boats to go to market, or 
breaking off the poor flowers to throw into a pile of 
brilliant mixed blossoms in the corner of the field to 
be used later for fertilizer. 

The bulbs are dug up after the blooming season is 
over and sent to market, where most of them find 
their way to England and America. The fields that 
were a carpet of gay colors in April become a flat 
farm of cabbages in August. When the cabbages 
are harvested in September the bulbs for the next 
spring’s growing are planted. 

In the towns the trees grow along the banks of the 
canals and help separate the water from the street. 
There are not many trees in the country and what 
there are are pollarded, that is, they have the 
branches all cut off except for a little bush at the 
top. The reason for this is that the shade might 
keep the crops from growing. It is such hard work 
to get the land for the Dutch farms that they do not 
want to waste any of it. So there is no shade in the 
country, and it is so flat that there is never a hill to 






A LAND OF FLOWERS 


3i 


keep the sky from looking like the inside of a great 
blue bowl. 

When Jan and Juliana stay all night with their 
cousins in the country they sleep in the big farm¬ 
house that is forty or fifty feet high and is house, 
and barn, and haymow, and tool shed, and poultry 
house, all combined. The grain will be stored there, 
too. A door from the dining room leads out into the 
cow stables. But the cows’ part of the house is kept 
just as clean as is the rest of the house. It is scrubbed 
every day, and often it has lace curtains in the 
windows just as the rest of the house has. 

When the farmer and his sons go to milk in the 
winter time they tie the cow’s tail up to the ceiling 
so that she cannot switch it into the milk pail. In 
the summer they do not bring the cows in, but go 
themselves out to the field with their pails. There 
they tie the cow’s legs together so that she will stand 
still while they milk. In cold weather the cows 
are given overcoats to keep them warm, and in warm 
weather they are often washed. 

The houses have floors made of tiles which are kept 
as clean as a plate by constant scrubbing. The beds 
are built into the walls like cupboards. Each one 
has a curtain in front of it so that it can be closed in 
the daytime. But every house has a company or 
guest bed that is never used, on which the mother of 
the house puts her best sheets and pillowcases. Then 






32 


CHILDREN OF HOLLAND 


she leaves the curtains open so that everyone can see 
how pretty and white they are. 

The children of Holland like pets and have a great 
many of them. They care for the chickens and 
ducks and geese that roam about the farm and swim 
in the ditches. They have little goats not much 
bigger than dogs that follow them about just like 
dogs. The story of Mary and her lamb must have 
come from Holland. Lovely white swans swim in 
the canals in the cities and the children feed them. 
Some of the biggest frogs in the world live in the 
low swampy places and jump off the dykes with a 
loud splash when anyone comes along. 

The dogs are pets, but often they are useful, too. 
They draw the little carts that take the milk and 
vegetables to town. Sometimes only one dog is 
harnessed to a cart, but if the load is heavy two are 
hitched up to make a team. They do not seem to 
mind at all. Perhaps they are glad to be useful and 
they know that when they get home they may be 
taken rabbit hunting in the dunes with a young 
master or mistress. 

William the Silent had a little spaniel who saved 
his life one night by scratching on his face and 
waking him when the enemy was near. He was so 
grateful that he always kept one of the little dogs 
near him. When he died his dog grieved for him 
and would not eat so that it died. A figure of the 




A LAND OF FLOWERS 


33 


faithful pet is carved at his feet on the fine tomb in 
the church at Delft. 

Storks are supposed to bring good luck and every 
child hopes to coax one to come and build a nest on 
his house roof. Since the big white birds like wagon 
wheels to build their nests on, many people put up a 
wheel either on the roof or on a pole near the house. 
There the stork makes a nest of sticks and straw and 
lays her eggs. When the little ones are hatched she 
feeds them on frogs and fish from the nearby canals. 
A stork in one of the parks in Amsterdam lost a leg 
in an accident and someone made her a wooden leg, 
which she wore very comfortably for a long time. 

Nobody shoots birds in Holland, so that they are 
very tame. Hundreds of plovers, a bird that likes 
to live near the water, fly about the fields. Herons 
and cranes stand in the water in the ditches with 
their long legs and look for little fish, and thousands 
of larks sing all the summer long. 

Nowadays there are factories in Holland to make 
cheese out of the milk from the big black and white 
cows, but many of the farmers still make their own. 
Cheese is made from the milk by adding a substance 
called rennet from the stomach of a calf. This 
rennet makes the solid part of the milk separate 
from the liquid part. The solid part is called the 
curds and the liquid is the whey. The curds are put 
into a bag and all the whey is pressed out. Then it 





34 


CHILDREN OF HOLLAND 


is salted and made into a round ball and put away 
to ripen. Ripening means that thousands of little 
plants that no one can see grow in the curds. They 
make it taste very different than milk does. When 
the plants have grown enough they say that the 
cheese is ripe. Sometimes that takes several months. 
Then the cheese is taken out and polished with oil 
and taken to the market to be sold. 






Chapter V 


GOOD THINGS TO EAT 

J AN and Juliana saw pigs and sheep on the farms. 
The sheep were raised for their wool, not to eat, 
because nobody in Holland likes mutton. They 
do like pork, especially if it is made up into sausage. 
In some parts of the country there is a special kind of 
sausage cake made like a loaf of bread with a filling 
of sausage meat that everyone eats the day before 
Lent starts in the spring. 

Children in Holland grow fat and rosy cheeked— 
and for a good reason. They get lots of good things 
to eat. It takes six meals a day to fill up a good little 
Dutchman. The first comes as soon as he gets out 
of bed. That is the “little breakfast.” Then he 
works for a couple of hours, milking the cows or 
scrubbing the doorstep, which must be made as white 
as milk every morning. By this time he is ready 
for the real breakfast, which probably has in it saus¬ 
age and cheese and bread and pancakes and coffee. 
The coffee of Holland is the best in the world because 
they own the island of Java, where the finest coffee 
is grown. 

After breakfast Jan manages to live until luncheon, 







36 


CHILDREN OF HOLLAND 


which may have many things in it, but is sure to 
have more cheese, plenty of butter, cream and milk, 
and eggs. The children especially like kaas, which 
is the soft, unripened cheese. In the afternoon he 
will have tea with little sweet cakes, and about five 
o’clock dinner is served, and, a couple of hours later, 
supper. His mother is one of the best cooks in the 
world. She makes dishes of stewed duck with apri¬ 
cots and of roast goose with spiced prunes. She 
cooks lots of fish, too. There are many fishermen 
in Holland and everyone eats fish and oysters. 

Every good child of Leyden eats “hodge-podge” 
on the third of October. This is a stew of carrots, 
onions, potatoes and meat. When the Dutch opened 
the dykes to drive out the Spanish during the terrible 
seige of Leyden, a little Dutch boy found some of 
the enemy’s camp fires still burning on a little hill 
where the water had not reached. Hanging over the 
fire was a kettle full of “hodge-podge” that the sol¬ 
diers were cooking for their supper. It was the first 
food that the city had seen for weeks. Now all the 
good folks of Leydon eat it for dinner on that day in 
memory of the brave people who fought in the siege 
of the city. 

Every town of Holland has its special kind of sweet 
to tempt the little folks. In the Hague it is “hopjes,” 
a kind of butterscotch; in Haarlem it is “halletjes,” 
a thin crisp molasses cooky; in Rotterdam the boys 



GOOD THINGS TO EAT 


37 


and girls eat “maastengels,” or sweet cakes; in Gouda 
are “Goudsche-spirits,” or spout cakes. They are 
called that because they are made with a spout. The 
children of Deventer have honey-cakes. 

Since Holland owns an island where coffee and 
sugar cane and tobacco grow, all of them the best in 
the world, they are fond of good coffee and tobacco 
in the form of cigars or pipes. They get a great deal 
of molasses from Java. They use it to make ginger¬ 
bread, which the children dearly love. Any good 
Dutch father, if he takes the children to town, will 
have a long roll of gingerbread in his pocket to give 
them when they get hungry. 

They use the sugar to make candy. When a man 
and woman are married they provide themselves 
with a great bag of “suikers”, or sugar-plums. As 
they ride home from the church the children stand 
along the road waiting for them to throw the candy. 
There is a mad scramble as they toss it out, and woe 
to the young couple who have not brought enough 
suikers to satisfy all of the boys and girls. They will 
always be thought stingy by the people of their 
neighborhood. 

At the Kermis the children eat “oliebollen”, a kind 
of little meat ball fried in oil. The fish stalls sell 
salted and dried fish, which many of the holiday 
makers eat raw. One game that the young people 
like especially is that of eating “ellekoek”. These 






38 


CHILDREN OF HOLLAND 


cakes are made in long narrow ribbons that are hung 
outside of booths. The children buy them by the 
yard. Then they play the game of eating them to¬ 
ward each other. When their cake is all eaten they 
finish with a kiss. They must not break it or touch 
it with their hands. All their friends stand around 
to see how they will come out. 

Another game at the Kermis is to see who can 
break a cake that is laid over a hollow place in a log. 
The men hit it with a stick to see who can break it. 
The cake is very hard and it is not easy to break. 
The man who succeeds in breaking it gets the cake, 
if there is enough of it left to be worth taking home. 

Ever since the lovely blue dishes were made in 
Delft the Dutch have been very proud of having 
nice things to cook and eat with. The cooking pans 
are of copper polished so brightly that the children 
can see their faces in the bottoms. The spoons and 
forks may have carved handles with little windmills 
perched on them, or storks, or tulips. Even the 
churns will be painted over with flowers. 





Chapter VI 


BACK TO THE CITY 

J AN and Juliana have a choice of three ways to go 
back to the city. They can ride in a farm cart 
drawn by a big horse, that will bump over the 
stony road on its two wheels, they can take a tram, a 
small car on an electric railroad, or they can ride on 
one of the canal boats. The canal boat seemed the 
most thrilling and they decided to take that. 

The boat was painted bright green, a color very 
much liked in Holland, and it was filled with cheese 
and cabbages going down to Amsterdam to market. 
A big white horse was hitched to a rope attached to 
the front of the boat and pulled it along at the rate 
of about a mile in an hour. They passed others that 
were being pulled by the women and children of the 
boat while the father sat on it and steered. 

The boats had little cabins where the family slept. 
They cooked and ate on the deck. Often there were 
boat-boxes dong the sides where tulips bloomed. 
Many of the children had never lived anywhere else 
than on a boat; they were born there, and when they 
grew up they bought boats of their own and still 
lived on the water. Now the government has passed 


39 















40 


CHILDREN OF HOLLAND 


laws that the children must go to school for four 
months out of every year, so that they may have to 
stop living on the boats. 

Along the canals are the windmills, painted bright 
red, blue and green. They are fifty and sixty feet 
tall with four large flaps to catch the wind. The 
wheel of the mill is arranged so that it can turn which 
ever way the wind blows. At first the mills were 
put up to pump water off the land, but later they 
were used for grinding corn, for sawing wood, and 
for making paper. For a time it was thought that 
the use of electricity would drive out the windmills, 
but at the time of the World War the Dutch dis¬ 
covered that they were the most useful things they 
had, because they could not get the coal to use for 
making electricity. 

Amsterdam is called the capital of Holland, al¬ 
though it has never been named by law as the capital. 
The Royal Palace, which was at one time the State 
House, is there. The queen is crowned in Amster¬ 
dam and comes there for a few days every year, but 
her real home is at The Hague. All the cities that 
end in “dam” in Holland were originally built where 
there was a dam in one of the rivers. Rotterdam and 
Edam, and Zaandam, all were named for a river 
with a dam in it. 

Amsterdam is a city built on islands—ninety of 
them—and it has three hundred bridges over the 





BACK TO THE CITY 


4i 


canals. There are streets and sidewalks on either 
side of the canals and sometimes trees are planted 
along the banks, but there are no fences or walls to 
keep people from falling into the water if they are 
careless. Some cities have companies much like fire 
companies to pull people out of the canals. 

The children visited the Jewish quarter where the 
finest diamonds in the world are cut and polished. 
The men who do the work are the children of Jews 
who were driven out of other lands by the Christians. 
They came to Holland for safety and took up their 
trade there. Every diamond cutter has a kind of 
badge of his trade; he lets the fingernail of his little 
finger grow long to use in scooping up the little 
stones. When the jewels are polished they are buried 
in a lump of clay with only the one surface that the 
workman is grinding exposed. The largest diamond 
in the world, the Koh-i-noor, was cut in Amsterdam. 
Every perfect stone must be cut to have fifty-eight 
sides, every surface exactly right. 

The Dutch people take very good care of the 
orphans and the poor and old people who need help. 
The Amsterdam orphans wear dresses divided up 
and down, half of them black and the other half 
red, because those are the colors of the city. The old 
people who are too poor to keep a house of their own 
live in a little square like a tiny town. Each person, 
or each couple, has a small house, just big enough 









42 


CHILDREN OF HOLLAND 


for a bed and stove and table. There are not many 
poor people, however, because the Dutch men and 
women save their money very carefully. 

In the morning all along the streets are women and 
children out scrubbing the doorstep and the walks, 
the side of the house, and even the trunks of the 
trees. Pails of water, scrub brushes and soap are 
the first things that a child in Holland learns about. 
The inside of the house is even cleaner than the out¬ 
side. The floors are of tiles, blue and white, or 
green and white. Often the walls are covered with 
tiles as well as the floor. A great, tiled fireplace 
often has the stories from the Bible in pictures on it 
and Jan and Juliana can learn their Sunday School 
lesson without going to church. 

The fireplace is a warm spot to learn a lesson and 
a Dutch church is likely to be pretty cold. They 
never used to have any stoves in them. Then the 
janitor, or sexton, kept in a little side room hundreds 
of little boxes lined with tiles and holding a cake of 
burning fuel. These were given to the ladies to put 
their feet on when they came to church. These 
stoofjes, as they were called, are still used in many 
churches. The Dutchmen do not seem to need any¬ 
thing but their pipes to keep warm with. The men 
have a habit of keeping their hats on in church just 
as the women do. 

When Holland became a Protestant instead of a 










Pails of water, scrub brushes and soap are the first 
things that a child in Holland learns about 


43 



















































































BACK TO THE CITY 


45 


Catholic nation, they took out all of the pictures and 
images and altars in the churches and put in a plain 
pulpit and then whitewashed the walls up as far as 
they could reach. The churches that look so lovely 
on the outside are cold and unfriendly on the inside. 
In some of them are special little stands to place 
coffins on at a funeral. There will be a certain place 
for each trade. If the dead man was a plumber he 
was laid on one stand, if he was a carpenter he had 
to be placed on the bier for carpenters. 

When Jan got the stomach ache from eating too 
many profferees at the Kermis his mother went out 
to the drug store to get some medicine. She knew 
where to find the drug store because every one has 
a big wooden head with an open mouth up over the 
door. Some of the heads were gilded to make them 
easier to see. There are lots of cow doctors, too, be¬ 
cause it is a very serious matter when a cow gets 
sick. They all have bright brass plates attached to 
their doors. 

In Amsterdam the houses are all built on piles, or 
stakes, that are driven far down into the sand. On 
top of the piles houses five and six stories are built. 
Each story is narrower than the last, so that the last 
one makes a peak. The houses are painted every 
year, all at the same time, so that the whole town 
seems to have had its face washed all at once. 

In Marken, a small island in the Zuider Zee, the 



4 6 


CHILDREN OF HOLLAND 


people all wear the old costumes that they have worn 
for hundreds of years. The mothers wear the tight 
caps with a long yellow curl on each side of their 
faces, and the men, who are mostly fishers, wear the 
very full trousers that are so comfortable on a boat. 
The little girls wear dresses with many layers of 
skirts and often are embroidered down the front in 
gay reds and pinks. So many visitors come to 
Marken that the people have gotten into the habit 
of asking for money when someone takes their 
picture with a camera. 

Many of the Dutch merchants live in country 
estates outside of the cities where they have their 
shops. These country houses have queer names. 
The one where Jan and Juliana live is called Buiten 
Gedachten, which means Beyond Expectation. One 
of the neighbors has a house that he calls Lust en 
Rust, which means Pleasure and Rest, and down the 
road is another called Groot Genoeg, or Large 
Enough for Us. 

Every Friday a cheese market is held at Alkmaar, 
one of the cities that suffered in the long war with 
the Spaniards. Very early in the morning the boats 
and carts arrive with loads of big yellow cheeses 
which they arrange in piles in the market place, 
leaving paths between for the buyers to walk 
through. The piles of cheese are always covered 
until the clock in the Weigh House rings nine 


BACK TO THE CITY 


47 


o’clock; then the trading begins. The merchants 
pinch, taste and listen to the sound of the cheese 
when it is thumped, the way an American boy 
listens to a watermelon to see if it is ripe. The owner 
stands by his pile of cheeses. When a sale is con¬ 
cluded the owner and buyer strike their hands to¬ 
gether as if they were shaking hands very hard. Then 
the owner calls a porter to carry his cheese into the 
Weigh House to be put on the scales. 

The porters carry the yellow balls on big trays 
that take two men to hold. The men are dressed 
in white with blue or red or green ribbons in their 
hats, according to what union they belong to. They 
may not start to weigh the cheese until the clock 
strikes half past ten. The bells in the Weigh House 
tower play little tunes all the time, and every hour 
two little horsemen with lances at rest come out on 
the tower and ride at each other. At noon the 
horsemen hold a real tournament for half an hour. 

Holland is a country of bells. Away from the 
cities where the noise of business hides them they 
ring and ring. Some of them are in the churches, 
some on the town halls. Sometimes they ring for 
the hours and sometimes they play tunes every 
quarter hour. The Old Church of Delft has a tower 
filled with bells, hundreds of bells, that ring day and 
night. Two things people remember about Delft, 
the wonderful supply of bells, forever ringing, and 








CHILDREN OF HOLLAND 


the lovely blue dishes that used to be made there. 
A factory that makes dishes still is running in Delft, 
but the dishes are not as pretty as those that were 
made a hundred years ago. 

In Delft they used to make the blue Bible tiles that 
lined the sides of the fireplaces in Dutch homes. 
Many houses still have them and the Dutch children 
still learn their Sunday school lesson from the fire¬ 
place. The story of David and his fight with Goliath 
may be on one side and the tale of Moses and his 
journey with the Children of Israel out of Egypt on 
the other. On the floor in front of the fire might 
be the picture of Rebecca at the well and of her 
wooing by Isaac. 






Chapter VII 


HOLIDAYS FOR EVERYBODY 

N O CHILDREN have more holidays to cele¬ 
brate than do the little folks of Holland. The 
first day that the ice on the canals is strong 
enough to bear is declared a holiday from school 
and everyone puts on his skates and has a good time. 
This is called Skating Day. At night, if there is 
enough snow every family gets out a sleigh and goes 
for a ride with one of the boys holding up a torch 
so that they can be seen. 

The third Sunday in April is Tulip Sunday. The 
flowers are out then and every window has a big 
bowl of them and every table has a vase full. In 
the churches the minister gives thanks to God for 
the flowers that have brought Holland so much good 
fortune. The day before Tulip Sunday the canals 
are full of boats bringing loads of flowers to the mar¬ 
ket, so that no home, however poor, is without a 
bouquet for the holiday. 

But the two holidays that Jan and Juliana look 
forward to with the greatest joy are the Kermis and 
St. Nicholas Day. In the big cities the Kermis is 
not celebrated so much any more, but in the country 


49 



50 


CHILDREN OF HOLLAND 


it is the big fun-making time of the year. The Ker¬ 
mis was at first the celebration of the founding of 
the first Christian church in the village. The name 
means Kirk-mass, or church festival. Now it is the 
village fair time and sometimes lasts for a week. 
Booths for fortune telling are set up in the streets, 
games of chance, sideshows with fat women and 
skeleton men appear, booths to sell proffertjes and 
wafelen, and tables where ribbons and toys are sold, 
are set up. 

Everyone who goes to a kermis must eat proffertjes. 
They are little cakes much like pancakes that are 
baked on a griddle with dents in it. They are made 
of a dough of wheat or buckwheat flour. Many are 
made at one time. One cook twists and bakes the 
bits of dough and another spreads them with butter 
and sugar. The customer sits in a little booth and 
is served on an American white cloth. He is ex¬ 
pected to eat twenty-four poffertjes and two wafelen 
at the first sitting. The wafelen are very much like 
the American waffles, only they are not so big. They 
too, are covered with butter and sugar. 

The Kermis is opened at noon by the ringing of 
the bells in the church tower and closed a week later 
when the bells ring again. On the roads outside of 
some of the towns white crosses are put up to show 
that anyone may come in and buy and sell. There 


0 ].\ 0 X o are stalls with hard-boiled eggs and pickles for sale 









Everywhere you go there are boats of every sort, loaded 
with all \inds of things for the market 


51 










































i'- u 




























































































■ 


























































HOLIDAYS FOR EVERYBODY 


53 


and many fish stalls. Sometimes a special play is 
given during Kermis week. 

In the large towns, before they stopped having the 
Kermis, one evening during the week was set aside 
for the servants to go to the Kermis. On that night 
the higher classes did not go to the fair at all and the 
servants went and frolicked and danced in the street 
between the booths and had a noisy time. If they 
met a stranger they would surround him and make 
him dance with them. The king and queen and 
the whole court used to open the Kermis at The 
Hague in the old days. Now the Kermis is no longer 
being held at The Hague because the town is too 
large for such a celebration. To repay the children 
of Amsterdam for taking away their Kermis the 
town council of the city allows them to play in the 
Bourse, a great public building, for one week, some 
time during the year. 

Nearly every Dutch town has its own special holi¬ 
day to celebrate some victory over the Spaniards or 
over the sea. On these days there are processions 
and feasting and thanksgiving services in the 
city churches. 

But the great holiday of the year is the festival of 
Saint Nicholas. This comes on the sixth of Decem¬ 
ber, the day dedicated to that saint. It is the time 
that the Dutch give presents to their friends and 
relatives and have family feasts, just as the English 





54 


CHILDREN OF HOLLAND 


and Americans do on Christmas day. For weeks 
before the shop windows are full of gifts. Special 
cakes are made in the form of a bishop and are called 
Klaasjes after St. Nicholas. Cakes are made, too, in 
the form of birds, animals and fishes. They are 
called Klaasjes, too. Large gingerbread men are 
baked and decorated with gilt paper. Special kinds 
of cakes are sold with heart-shaped candies on them 
for young men to send to their sweethearts. 

On the days before the festival a man dressed to 
look like the good saint in a bishop’s robes and hat, 
rides through the city streets on a white horse. After 
him comes a car driven by a negro boy and filled 
with packages. The children gather around and 
shout at the saint to bring them the presents that 
they want for Saint Nicholas Day. 

The night before the day, Saint Nicholas Eve, the 
children put their wooden shoes down by the fire 
and put in them wisps of hay to feed the white horse 
that the saint rides over the housetops. In the morn¬ 
ing they find pieces of money and sweet cakes and 
candy in the shoes. But that is only the start of the 
fun. At dinner there is a great feast with roast goose 
stuffed with sausages as the main course. Then, just 
before dark, the children spread a sheet before the 
house door and stand near it and sing a song of wel¬ 
come to Saint Nicholas, who is expected to make 
them a second visit. They sing: 



HOLIDAYS FOR EVERYBODY 


55 


“Saint Nicholas, good, holy man, 

Put on your best gown; 

Ride with it to Amsterdam, 

From Amsterdam to Spain”. 

While they are singing someone comes to the door; 
when they finish the door flies open and a shower of 
sweet cakes and candy falls on their heads, and in 
the doorway stands Saint Nicholas with packages for 
the children in his hands. Sometimes he has with 
him a negro boy with a stick to use on bad children 
and a bag to carry them off in, but nobody has ever 
heard of any children being put into the bag. Often 
Saint Nicholas stops and asks the children questions 
about how good they have been, and if they have 
learned their lessons in school. He may even make 
them repeat some of the verses they have learned. If 
he asks them to say the national song of the Nether¬ 
lands, Jan and Juliana will stand up and repeat: 
“Let him in whom old Dutch blood flows, 
Untainted free and strong; 

Whose heart for Prince and Country glows, 
Now join us in our song; 

Let him with us lift up his voice, 

And sing in patriot band, 

The song at which all hearts rejoice, 

For Prince and Fatherland, 

For Prince and Fatherland ” 

The older people hide the gifts that they have for 











56 


CHILDREN OF HOLLAND 


each other and have a great deal of sport trying to 
find them. They send the maid out with a gift and 
have her ring the door-bell, so that it will appear 
that someone else has brought the present, or they 
may give it to a neighbor to deliver. Tiny gifts may 
be wrapped in great packages so that the person who 
gets it may have all the fun of unwrapping it. It 
may even be baked in a cake, not to be discovered 
until the cake is eaten. 

Saint Nicholas lived in the fourth century and 
spent all of his life in doing good. He started the 
practice of giving gifts on his birthday by giving 
money to a poor man. This is the story that all the 
children of Holland know. 

A certain man lost all of his money. He had three 
beautiful daughters and he planned to get some 
money by selling the girls as slaves. Saint Nicholas 
heard of his dreadful plan and that night went to the 
man’s house and dropped a purse full of money 
through a broken window. In the purse was enough 
money to pay for the oldest daughter. The next 
night he took enough money for the second daughter 
and dropped it through the chimney down into the 
fireplace. It fell just when the old man was stooping 
down to get a coal to light his pipe. 

On the third night the old man watched to see 
who it was that was bringing the money, and when 
Saint Nicholas came to the door he ran out and 




HOLIDAYS FOR EVERYBODY 


57 


caught the good saint by the robe and held him fast. 

“Good Saint Nicholas,” he said, “why dost thou 
hide thy good deeds?” Ever since then children 
know that it is Saint Nicholas who throws the money 
down the chimney into the wooden shoes that are set 
out to catch it. Because he saved the lives of the 
three beautiful young girls all girls of Holland think 
that he is their special friend. 

There is another story that Jan and Juliana know 
and tell to each other on Saint Nicholas Eve. It is 
about three little boys who went out into the woods 
and got lost. They wandered about looking for a 
place to sleep when night came on. They were about 
to lie down on the ground when one of them saw a 
light between the trees. They went up to it and saw 
that it was coming from the window of a poor cot¬ 
tage on the edge of a clearing. 

They went up to the door and knocked and an 
evil-looking old woman opened the door. She lived 
in the hut with her husband who was a farmer. The 
boys told her that they had lost their way in the forest 
and asked her to give them a place to sleep. She 
asked her husband what she should do and he, in a 
gruff voice, told her to give them a bed in the loft. 
The three little boys were so tired that they gladly 
climbed the ladder and went to sleep on the hay. 

The old man and his bad wife thought that the 
boys looked as if they were the sons of rich people 



5 » 


CHILDREN OF HOLLAND 


and would have money in their pockets. So after 
the boys were sound asleep the wicked old man 
climbed up into the loft and killed the three little 
boys. But when he looked in their pockets for 
money he could not find any. Then the old man 
and woman began to be afraid that someone would 
find out what they had done, so they carried the 
bodies of the boys down into the cellar and put them 
in the barrel with the pork that they were saving 
for winter. 

The next day the farmer went to market with 
some vegetables to sell. While he was sitting in the 
market place Saint Nicholas came to him and asked, 
“Have you any pork to sell?” 

“No,” said the farmer. 

“What about the three young pigs you have in the 
pork barrel in your house in the woods?” asked 
Saint Nicholas. 

The farmer saw that he had been found out and 
fell on his knees and begged the saint to forgive him. 
Saint Nicholas told the old man to lead the way to 
his house. The farmer left his vegetables in the 
market and went home, with the saint following 
him. He showed the way to the cellar and the barrel 
of pork. Saint Nicholas waved his wand over the 
barrel and out jumped the three little boys as good 
as new. Then the saint took them through the woods 












HOLIDAYS FOR EVERYBODY 


59 


In some parts of Holland the children go about to 
the farmhouses before Easter asking for eggs. When 
they have two or three apiece they take them home 
and boil them in beet juice or some other color so 
that they are pretty. On Easter day the boys and 
girls meet in a meadow and sit in a circle with their 
eggs. When they are all seated they crack their eggs 
together in such a way that only one is broken. The 
egg that breaks is given up to the owner of the egg 
that did not break. 



Chapter VIII 


WHEN JAN GOES COURTING 

W HEN a Dutch boy sees a girl that he likes he 
goes to see her at her house. Sometimes he 
brings a special kind of cake. He puts it 
down on the table and nobody seems to notice it. 
He talks to all the family. After a time the rest of 
the family go to bed and he is left with the girl of 
his choice. If she lets the fire go out he knows that 
she does not want him to stay, but if she puts more 
fuel on the fire he knows that he is welcome, and 
then they cut and eat the cake. 

After they are engaged to be married he may take 
her to the Kermis and to other places of amusement. 
They can skate together in the winter. They may 
be engaged two or three years, for the girl must get 
together a chest of linen for her new home. 

When the date for the wedding is set the girl’s 
father and mother send to their friends a box of 
sweet cakes and a bottle of a special kind of wine 
called Bride’s Tears. This is the invitation to the 
wedding. Often the wedding takes place at the 
home of the young man’s parents and as the young 
couple ride through the country they scatter coins 


60 







WHEN JAN GOES COURTING 61 

for the children to pick up. They are often married 
on Thursday because the marriage fees at the 
churches are not so high that day. 

If young Jan and his bride take a honeymoon trip 
they have a great many places to go. They might 
take a trip to Rotterdam to some of the famous pic¬ 
ture galleries there. No country has had so many 
famous artists as has Holland. 

After the land had settled down following the 
terrible war with Spain and there was peace for many 
years artists began to paint pictures in every town. 
This was the time, about 1550, when trade guilds 
grew up, and the burghers of the towns wanted their 
pictures painted, and the arquebusiers ordered pic¬ 
tures that would get as many of them in as possible. 
They were companies of soldiers who protected the 
town from all enemies. 

Surely if Jan and his bride were going picture see¬ 
ing they would go to see the famous “Night Watch’* 
in the Ryks Museum in Amsterdam. A company 
of soldiers are going out on a parade. They wanted 
their picture painted and each one that got into the 
picture paid the artist one hundred florins. He got 
as many of them in as he could. The gallant captain 
is up in front with a wide hat and a wider lace 
collar; beside him is a gentleman with a yellow coat 
and a yellow hat. There are even some ladies in the 
picture. It is said that the picture is really of a day- 







62 


CHILDREN OF HOLLAND 


time scene, but it has been called the “Night Watch” 
for so long that no one will believe it. 

In the same museum is one of the greatest portraits 
ever made, a picture of an old lady, Elizabeth Bas. It 
is also by Rembrandt, who painted “The Night 
Watch”. She is all dressed up to have her picture 
painted, with a great white ruff about her neck and 
white cuffs on her black silk dress, and a white cap 
with flaps at the sides covering all her hair. She has 
a fine white handkerchief with lace on the edge in 
her hands. She looks like the kind of a grandmother 
that any Dutch family would be glad to have. She 
would see to it that none of them got into trouble. 

The artist, whose real name was Rembrandt 
Harmenszoon van Rijn was the son of a miller of 
Leyden. When he first learned to paint he had his 
studio in his father’s mill. He was twenty years 
older than another very famous painter of Leyden, 
Jan Steen. 

Rembrandt painted many groups of men besides 
“The Night Watch.” Six of the syndics, or rulers of 
the Cloth Guild, had him paint their portraits to¬ 
gether, and a number of doctors hired him to paint 
them with one of their number showing them how 
the muscles of a hand worked. This is the famous 
picture called “The School of Anatomy”. Seven 
doctors are looking on while the eighth one shows 
them the hand. They all are very much interested. 




WHEN JAN GOES COURTING 63 

This picture is in the Mauritshuis, and Jan would 
have to journey to The Hague to see it. 

Jan Steen was a jolly painter, whose father had 
been a brewer. He liked to paint happy families. 
One of them is of a group of fat, laughing children 
trying to teach a cat to dance to the music that one 
of them is playing on a flute, while the dog barks 
at them. This is in the Ryks Museum in Amsterdam, 
also, together with the “Night Watch.” 

Another artist who liked to paint happy people was 
Franz Hals. He was fat and jolly, like Jan Steen. 
He made a picture of a soldier all dressed up in fine 
velvet and lace, with his mustache waxed to little 
points, that he calls “The Laughing Cavalier”. He 
painted soldiers and families, too. There were no 
cameras in the days when these men lived, so that 
if they wanted to keep a picture of their family they 
had to have it painted. 

We know how all the artists look because they 
almost always made pictures of themselves. They 
hung a big mirror on the wall near them and painted 
themselves from their reflections in the mirror. 
Many of them became so famous that they were in¬ 
vited to go to England and Spain to make portraits 
of the royal families in those countries. 









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